4 Efficiencies CMC Offers Salesforce Development Teams

Appirio CMC Work Manager is an application, designed to support Salesforce implementations and streamline Agile development at every phase of the project. So how does Work Manager do this? Simple. It’s designed specifically for the Agile methodology and for Salesforce, meaning you get efficiencies that generic tools just can’t offer.

Check out these four key efficiencies that could revolutionize your Salesforce development.

Plan and Track with User Stories
User Stories are at the heart of Agile development, but many project management solutions don’t involve stories or requirements. So it’s no surprise that the lack of clear requirements is the number one reason Agile fails. And that’s why Work Manager was designed to place Stories at the core of each development project. Because Stories are the primary element of Work Manager, requirements are present not only at the outset of a project and during planning, they’re present at each phase of the Agile process: planning, development, QA, UAT, and deployment. This prevents requirements from falling through the cracks and streamlines functional QA and UAT.

So how are Stories different in CMC than other project management solutions? Stories built in CMC can be broken down into Tasks for clearer development goals, to ensure your team is building sprints that are on track for success from Day One. Test Cases are added directly to the Story record for ease of testing and tracking Issues.

Because all the Test Cases and Tasks live right on the Story, Appirio’s CMC Work Manager makes it easier and quicker than ever to create Related Stories — because with the click of a button, these elements can be cloned too.

To top it all off, Stories, along with their test cases, issues, and tasks, are scheduled directly into sprints — so requirements are at developers’ fingertips as they work.

Manage Your Metadata with Manifest Items
Manifest Items allow your team to track all changes made to your environment during the implementation of Stories and Issues. By attaching change records directly to the Story and Issue records, you’re able to build a contextual audit trail of the changes made, why they were made, and when they were made. This granularity allows Salesforce project managers to drill down and find answers to any question a client might throw their way. Plus, having Manifest Items present right on Stories and Issues streamlines code reviews and QA, too.

And when it's time to deploy updated code, Work Manager can generate a package.xml file to combine with any tool your team uses for deployment. Whether you’re using ANT, Eclipse, or Change Sets, for example, Work Manager translates seamlessly and makes deployments fast and easy.

For those ready to take the step into the future of release management, teams can use AppirioDX to convert manifests to deployment and automate deployments, tests, and versioning controls.

Automate Testing with Test Suites and QA Automation
Work Manager supports the full range of testing — with Reviews, Test Cases, Test Suites, Test Results, and automation capabilities. Business Analysts and QA Engineers can quickly aggregate Test Cases from individual Stories into Test Suites that cover the end-to-end functionality of an Epic. Epic-level Test Suites streamline UAT and provide easy access to testing instructions to your business users.

Test Cases in Work Manager also support automated QA. Use the power of the tool to launch automated tests directly from Test Cases on Stories. QA Automation eliminates the need to manually test Test Cases and Test Results and any testing application (e.g. Selenium) can be used for execution.

Customize Salesforce Dashboards and Reports
Because CMC Work Manager is native to Salesforce, teams have access to completely customizable Salesforce reports and dashboards, rather than a handful of canned reports. Why limit your team to standard reporting when Work Manager unlocks the capability to easily build reports that will report on any field on any page?

All of your reporting needs for Stories, Tasks, Issues, Sprints and more are effortlessly met by Appirio CMC Work Manager’s custom dashboards, which you can build to display and summarize data in a matter of seconds.